WASHINGTON: NASA just announced a huge cooperative effort to analyze other worlds for possible life.The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or NExSS, brings together scientists from three different NASA research centers, the SETI Institute and teams at 10 different universities.
But this isn’t exactly a rebooted search for extraterrestrial intelligence. NASA hasn’t funded that goal since 1992, when it deployed the High Resolution Microwave Survey to search for extraterrestrial transmissions. Congress killed its budget less than a year later.
The nonprofit SETI Institute is keeping up the search, using independently funded tools such as the Allen Telescope Array.
But NASA’s new NExSS initiative is focused more on life than intelligent life, using verifiable scientific data from a relatively new field: the study of exoplanets, which orbit stars other than our own. (Video viaNASA)
The first definitive detection of a pair of exoplanets came in 1992. Researchers found evidence of the first exoplanet orbiting a G-type star, like our own sun, three years later.
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